A Rand Index-Based Analysis of Consensus Protocols

Abstract

Consensus is the heart of Blockchain Technology. Consensus algorithms suffer from issues of either energy inefficiency in the context of Proof of Work (PoW) or monopoly in the context of Proof of Stake (PoS). In other words, while PoW suffers from scalability and performance and PoS suffers from monopoly, both fairness issues are from various interpretations of the blockchain platform. To overcome these issues, there have been several hybrids of PoW and PoS consensus protocols. In this paper, we show how Rand Index can be used for cluster analysis hence analyzing various aspects of consensus protocols. The analysis focuses on issues like correctness, fork formation, and fairness aspects like overcoming monopoly, equal participation of nodes in block creation, decreased latency in commit transaction, a fair selection of validators, minimizing the size/requirement of permissioned networks, etc. We first demonstrate our approach to the Ripple protocol and correlate it with its’ analogies of correctness. We further show, how conditions like fork formations can be overcome through our analysis. Toward the end of the paper, we propose a cluster environment model for realizing a fair selection of validators.